Staff & Writers

Yi Ye

Founder

Writer

Yi Ye is the founder of haptic.(press).  He appears regularly with his column, “the Rise of the OSS,” (Open Source Society) reporting on developments in the inexorable liberation of information and technologies from outmoded ideological formations.  

Yi is also honored to support and contribute to Thea Sewphie Li’s ongoing analysis of the seminal work, BoJack Horseman, in “Horse Stories for Ghosts.”

 

Thea Sewphie Li

Chief Rhetoric Officer

Thea Sewphie perfected the fine art of pess-imism in junior high school.  Aside from managing the rhetorical strategy for haptic.(press), Ms. Li extols the virtues of bottomed-out and pess-based living and thinking in “the Pessimist.”  

“Dance, Dance, Dance” explores human movement as a metaphor and survival philosophy for existence in a world engulfed by poststructrual nihilism.

The aforementioned, “Horse Stories for Ghosts,” has been applauded by Mr. Horseman himself, saying, “Ms. Li has provided the most penetrating and definitive articulation of the many existential and psycho-emotional minefields that liberally dotted my journey toward self-realization.” (Manatee Faire, 2016)

“Horse Stories for Ghosts” was the first and still only recurring magazine column to win a Pulitzer Prize on the strength of its title alone.  The column has subsequently gone on to EGOT (winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony), joining an elite group of only twelve individuals and five media franchises.  It is the only magazine column in the exclusive club.

 

Y. Hunter Baumsen

Editor in Chief

Writer

Though rewriting and taking credit for the writing of others is a full-time job, Y. Hunter also takes time out of his precious schedule to present summaries of all the latest downloads from renowned speaker and coach, Ret. Major Motoko Kusanagi.  These can be found in either “Major GhostLove: Or How We Learn to Stop Talking and Hear Our Ghosts” or

“Major GhostLove: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Net.”

You would think someone charged with the final editorial decisions of an entire publication could settle on one (clearly derivative) name for his own column, but you would be wrong.

 

葉劉儀

Chief Enlightenment Officer

Charged with keeping the staff of haptic.(press) sane, 葉劉儀 utilizes only the most effective techniques drawn equally from ancient practices and cutting edge science.  These include responding to queries with blank, uncomprehending, stares, quizzically raising an eyebrow or two, and proffering the occasional, “chill.”

葉劉儀 also provides rambling and elliptical notes from a weekly Haruki Murakami book club in “The Clockwork Horse Manuals.”

We thought 葉劉儀 would eventually grow tired of stopping us in the hall to ask, “do you dream Haruki Murakami?  Or does he dream you?” but that hasn’t been the case …

 

Scarlet Jo Draper

Chief Operations Officer

Daughter of legendary adventurer and global revolutionary, Sally Beth Draper, and granddaughter of advertising guru and titan, Donald Francis Draper-Whitman, Scarlet channels her aggressive addiction to enterprise and penchant for sublime effortless messaging in service of smoothly helming the con of haptic.(press).

Because she’s more awesome and harder working than the entire staff of haptic.(press) combined (even when you include Scarlet with everyone else, in defiance of math, she is by herself is still more productive), Scarlet generously casts her pearls of wisdom among us filthy swine by writing and editing three regular columns:

“You’d Like to Buy the World a ..?”

Dispatches from the Memetic Marketplace

“MAD MEDS”

A discussion of historically regarded industrial design and marketing campaigns, from antiquity to today.

“Serra Barbara, Santa Barbara”

A Career Woman’s Guide for How To LEAN InTo the Coming Matriarchy.

 

Thom E. Wan Kenobi

Hack

Thom was forced to take this job and write this column.  After many arrogant attempts at evading destiny, he has wisely stopped running and now waves the white flag of surrender.  “Sexts from the MonoMyth” will bring us a “behind the scenes” peek into a thrilling saga of lust and seduction that just happens to involve billions of Hero Protagonists.  A menage a infini, so to speak …

 

HAL80808

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We have no idea who or what this is.  Is it a single person?  A committee?  An overly elaborate performance art project?  The mystery abides, but every week, “What Would Stanley Do?” arrives via drone courier in a box of indecipherable disordered punch cards.  We hope you enjoy these unilateral pronouncements about what obscure but influential Bronx-born artist, Stanley Kubrick, would, you know, do.

 

Hannah Eve Chiba

Chief Fitness Officer, Writer, Two-Thirds Palindrome

Hannah Eve owes her badassery and career to her overprotective father, the industrialist Charles Phillip Chiba, who raised her and her siblings on a steady diet of iron fists and bitter herbs.  “Everyone Is Already Gong Fu Fighting …” is a distillation of the philosophical and practical secrets of her family’s system of combat and personal mastery.

 

Rustin “Rust” Kusanagi, II

Writer

If both your parents were mildly depressed and philosophically impenetrable yet highly functional and deadly cops who nonetheless committed themselves to chasing down and vanquishing the biggest, baddest bad guys on the planet, you might relate to all the highly specific yet ultimately boring insecurities and complexes that plague the middling writer and doughy layabout, Rustin Kusanagi.  

Rust buries his ennui and frustrated ambitions by alternating between false cheer and morbid fascination in his writing, which can be found by referencing the tags:

“ask your eventual robot overlord …” #SingularityHilarity #singularityNOW

 

Richard Sanchez-Yap

Scientist

Before interdimensionally-wanted terrorist, Rick Sanchez (dimension C-137), was arrested and sentenced to eighty-eight thousand non-consecutive life sentences, his cousin and genetic clone Richard Sanchez-Yap (dimension T-429) managed to compile a holostruct of Rick C-137’s neuro-rhetorical waveform.  

We keep asking Holo Rick C-137 if it would like to have access to its own lab to continue its originator’s scientific research, but it always responds tersely, “No.  Just answering advice letters.  That’s the priority right now.  Don’t ask.  It’ll take too long to explain.”

We have no idea what caused this shift in the normally taciturn and dismissive Rick C-137 (data migration error?) but “Personal and Relationship Advice From an Indifferent Unrelatable Genius” has already been recognized as enjoying the highest success rate of problem resolution of any advice column in recorded interstellar history, or at least since Q1949, when such statistics began being recorded in earnest.

 

Guest Contributors

 

Vivian Lei Jiang

Writer, Editorial & Production Assistant

Vivian Lei maps the increasingly sophisticated and fantastical terrain of Japanese history, culture, and art in her series of essays,  “The Girl with the Purple Hair.”

 

Connor Lin

Writer, Adventurer, Artist

“Reading the Tea Leaves” brings you reports from the frontiers of human migration and survival mastery.  Through tea and traveling the world, Connor Lin attempts to decipher his own destiny, and the destiny of our species.

 

Ip So Lee & Ip So Mei

Twins, Geminis

“Contra Non Positive” and “ContraLocution” are the titles of long-awaited philosophical essays the twins promise will “change everything …”  Though initially skeptical, we’re now all waiting with bated breath for the light of truth to shine upon us …

 

a.B. Ly

Intern, Heir Apparent, Crown Princess

a.B. Ly “Trust Fund Follies”

 

Saul Carlos Zimmerman

Filmmaker, Screenwriter, Poet

“It’s Alright Ma, There Will Be Blood”